U.s. Expels Envoy From Belarus

Anxiety Grows Over `Authoritarian Slide'

March 27, 1997|By New York Times News Service.

WASHINGTON — The United States ordered the expulsion of a Belarus diplomat Wednesday in retaliation for what Washington called the "unwarranted and unjustified" ouster of an American diplomat monitoring an anti-government march Sunday in Minsk, the capital of Belarus.

Washington also has recalled its ambassador to Belarus, Kenneth Yalowitz, as it seeks ways to respond to the former Soviet republic's "accelerating slide toward authoritarianism," said State Department official John Dinger.

The U.S., which has suspended its $40 million in annual aid to Belarus, has few effective levers to pull against President Alexander Lukashenko, a popular Soviet-style boss, according to American officials.

Lukashenko has resisted economic and political reform, has cracked down on the opposition with a series of arrests and has expelled the executive director of the Belarussian Soros Foundation, which supports independent media and trade unions.

He has also ordered an audit of the foundation and other nongovernmental organizations and clamped down on Russian journalists trying to cover events in Belarus.

"Why Lukashenko feels the need to poison relations with the United States just now we don't know, but he's doing it and if he doesn't know he's doing it, he needs better advisers," a senior U.S. official said.

"The effort to intimidate embassies, muzzle the press and crack down on Soros and other private foundations is all of a piece," the official continued. "It's an effort to neutralize any possible organization outside government control, and shows a man without the confidence to act democratically."

"The very fact that Russian television channels have been denied the right to send information material from Minsk prompts deep concern in the Kremlin," said Sergei Yastrzhembsky, President Boris Yeltsin's spokesman.

Lukashenko, a former head of a Soviet collective farm who was elected in 1994, "is taking Belarus in a direction antithetical not only to that of Europe but also to that of his own neighbors, the Poles, Lithuanians and the Russians themselves," said the senior American official.

The official played down the likelihood that anything would come of an agreement last April 2 on the economic and political reunification of Russia and Belarus, which was among the first republics to declare independence when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

Yeltsin and Lukashenko are supposed to sign a more concrete agreement, but any economic unification would require Belarus to make the kinds of economic and legislative reforms that Lukashenko refuses to contemplate.

The political opposition in Minsk, which U.S. officials regard as not very effective, is planning another large protest march like the one on Sunday that an American diplomat, First Secretary Serge Alexandrov, had been monitoring. Alexandrov, who is of Belarussian origin, left Monday after being expelled.

In response, Washington on Wednesday expelled Vladimir Gramyka, first secretary of the Belarussian Embassy, giving him 24 hours to leave.

The executive director of the Belarussian Soros Foundation, Peter Byrne, who was expelled last week, said in Washington that Lukashenko had cut off private groups from sources of money abroad.